“You’re too close to your ascension to allow distraction now,” he continues. “Marriage discussions will move forward soon. Until then, you will keep your appetites useful.”
There’s nothing accidental in that wording. No room to mistake what he means.Useful.Directed away from anything that belongs to me in ways he wouldn’t approve of.
I feel the weight of Salvatore’s absence like a bruise under the skin.
“Understood,” I say.
“Get some rest,” he says. “You leave for Vienna again in three days, and I want your head clear when you get there.”
I leave before I say something reckless.
The hallway outside the study feels colder, cleaner, the kind of false relief you get stepping out of a church after a funeral. Viktor doesn’t follow me this time. Good. I’m not fit for company, and he’d only look at me with that flat older-brother understanding I can’t fucking stand when I’m this close to tearing my own skin off.
The driver pulls the car around, and I get in without a word, sink back into the leather seat, and stare out at the city while his engine carries me away from one expensive prison toward another.
By the time we reach my building, I’ve already decided exactly how the rest of the night will go.
I’m going to strip, scrub the woman off my skin until the water turns cold, then open the case and float far enough out of myself that sleep comes before memory does. It’s not a glamorous plan, but glamour’s for fools and magazines. Survival is always uglier than that.
The doorman nods, the elevator crawls, and my key turns in the lock with the small, familiar click that usually means I’m alone.
Tonight, the second I step inside, I know I’m not.
The apartment is dark except for the low lamp near the sofa and the city light bleeding through the curtains, but the air is wrong. Warm, thick steam drifts faintly from the half-open bathroom door at the end of the hall, carrying the scent of water and expensive soap.
I already have the gun out before I fully think it through.
Instinct. Training. The one thing my father gave me that never fails even when everything else does.
I move silently down the hallway, shoes whispering over wood, one hand steady on the grip while the other pushes the bathroom door wider.
Steam billows into the bedroom, blurring the mirror and slicking the tile with heat. I thumb the safety off, the click sharp in the room, and at once a voice drifts through the white haze.
“Careful,cuore mio.”
Salvatore?
My entire body stops.
For one genuinely stupid second, I think I might be dreaming already, that maybe I’m higher than I realize, that maybe I open the wrong fucking door in my own head. Then he speaks again, low and dry and so unmistakably himself it cuts straight through me.
“If you shoot me, I’ll be very annoyed.”
The gun slips from my hand and lands on the tile with a clatter I barely register.
I step forward into the steam like a man walking into a miracle he doesn’t deserve.
He’s behind the glass, one arm braced on the wet tile wall, dark hair plastered back from his face by the shower spray. No shirt, no tie, no polished Vieri armor. Just skin and sharp mouth and those dark, impossible eyes on me through the fogged panel.
He looks unreal enough that if I blink too long, I’m convinced he’ll disappear. Water tracks down his chest in gleaming lines.
For a second, I can only look.
Not because I’ve never seen him naked. I have. More times than I can count and still not enough to keep this from hitting me like a fist to the ribs every single time. It’s because he isn’t supposed to be here. Not after the walls are starting to close around us so visibly that I can almost hear the mortar cracking.
He turns his head and looks at me through the steam, and whatever I’m expecting to see on his face isn’t this.
He looks exhausted. Furious. Relieved.
